Download on Mediafire

King Krule- King Krule EP

This EP is awfully hard to pin down, for many reasons. First of all, blatant Brit Archy “King Krule” Marshall is only 17, but he has the voice of a 40-year old. Perhaps I’m biased, but it seems like he’s got a lot more on his mind than the average teenager.

While this album is brief in length and his vocal moments are even briefer, there is still enough time to get a sense of deep decay within his being. He talks about his heart, soul, and mind, all of which seem to be in conflict with each other, which leads him to despair more often than not. However, his disturbing and sometimes grotesque lyrics and vocals contrast with the underlying bed of music, a lush texture of jazzy guitar and synthetic orchestration, occasionally anchored by drums and at other times spiny beats which, strangely enough, lead to a feel reminiscent of another kid, one Cudi. When you consider that one’s own low-voiced ruminations of self-loathing, it kinda makes sense. -Jesse Paller

RIYL: Zoo Kid, James Blake, Gorillaz, Kid CuDi
Recommended Tracks: 2, 3, 5

English indie punk rock trio Johnny Foreigner played Islington venue Relentless Garage earlier this month to a mixed crowd with demographics ranging from Warped Tour teenagers to normal twenty-somethings to a significantly older couple who I’m pretty sure weren’t dragged along by a rambunctious son.

Going into this gig, I was almost completely unfamiliar with Johnny Foreigner aside from the few YouTube links a friend sent me and a distracted album listen, but I could tell this show was going to involve a bit more yelling and moshing than I’m used to. The opening acts were mediocre at best and brought me back to my early teenage years of listening to Fall Out Boy on my green iPod Mini. Luckily, and as expected, Johnny Foreigner’s set was a refreshingly smart and fun indie-take on pop-punk.

Johnny Foreigner, hailing from Birmingham England, is made up of lead vocalist and guitarist Alexei Berrow, bassist and additional vocalist Kelly Southern and drummer Junior Elvis Washington Laidley. All have a spunky, youthful edge, but Kelly is clearly, and deservedly, the band’s sweetheart. “Kelly” chants and shouts of “I love Kelly” arose from the crowd throughout the night.

Just before taking the stage, the band played an automated voiceover of NME.com’s grating and uninformed review of their new album Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything. Even though I wasn’t aware of the cool statement until my friend clued me in, surely fans picked up on it, and that seems like what Johnny Foreigner is really all about – playing music because they want to, not caring about those who don’t like it, connecting to their fans and, through it all, having fun.

Check out the music video from my favorite track played during the set and the third single off their second album, Waited Up ‘Til It Was Light.

Another bonus – here’s my favorite song off their newest album, Johnny Foreigner vs Everything, “200x.”

johnny foreigner – 200X by alcopop

By Marissa Cetin

WVAU’s concert series Capital Punishment returns this Friday, December 2, featuring instrumental noise-rock group the Psychic Paramount. The band’s recent album II was featured in Pitchfork’s Overlooked Records of 2011:

Riffs churn and bang, guitar leads triumphantly well up, and drummer Jeff Conaway smashes his kit hard enough to break skulls. This is experimental underground rock that the kids from Dazed and Confused could appreciate– a pure-badass astral exploration that always keeps its toes in the mud. It took the Psychic Paramount six years to make the album, but it still sounds– in a good way– like the result of a week’s worth of seriously locked-in garage jamming.”

This year, we’ve moved the show upstairs to Kay Chapel to provide a dramatic backdrop for the Psychic Paramount’s dynamic live set – lights off, backlit, with a constant smoke machine. Doors open at 9:30 p.m. Don’t miss WVAU’s largest event of the semester. It’s free. Bring everyone you know.

The Psychic Paramount @ Union Pool:

Download on Mediafire

Right now the most popular section of AU’s student newspaper is Eagle Rants, a daily opinion column where anybody can anonymously post their thoughts on anything. On November 16, in between notes about being lonely in the dorms and arguments that communications students don’t have ‘real’ majors, The Eagle published this:

“Dear wvau,
Most of your shows that I have sampled played hipster music. I am not a hipster. I do not enjoy your strange tunes. Also, other hipsters will not admit that they enjoy the same music as someone else. Where is there room for a fan base?”

The next day’s edition contained this response rant:

“@The person ranting about all the hipster music on WVAU: I heartily concur. I have a show with them and have to bring in all my own music because I like mainstream music. TOO MUCH INDIE.”

As General Manager of WVAU, this was frustrating to read; you never want to hear that people inside or outside of your organization are unhappy with it. As we close the semester and get ready for a new year of college radio, I’d like to address both of these people, starting with the idea of what a hipster is and where that personality type exists in WVAU (spoiler alert: it doesn’t).

The first problem with the word “hipster” is that it’s been used to describe everybody— at this point it basically means “person I don’t like and don’t associate myself with.” It’s like the word “quirky” in that we’ve used it so many times to get across so many different ideas that just saying something is “quirky” doesn’t actually help to define it at all. Still, I’m not going to play dumb— the idea here is that a hipster is somebody who exclusively loves obscure music, who will hate anything popular and who will judge the people in his or her life who love popular music.

Right away I can disqualify myself from this definition. Queen is one of my favorite bands, and, while I can’t tell you what the quadratic formula is or does anymore, I have the lyrics to entire Duran Duran and Prince albums committed to memory (despite the fact that I was born in 1989, years after either band had peaked). I bought the Beatles reissues two years ago despite already owning all of the albums and when my favorite bands sign to major labels, I don’t bat an eye. I don’t shut things out of my life because other people like them and I don’t know anybody who does.

I don’t think you do either. I’ve never talked to anybody who rejected my beloved ABBA because they were too popular; I’ve only heard the argument that ABBA is dated or cheesy or hollow. Calling somebody a hipster because they don’t like music that you like is selling short the idea that people come to music for different reasons. I dislike The All-American Rejects because I think they write boring songs, not because they do well on the Billboard chart. If you dislike The Jesus Lizard, I’m not going to assume that those feelings stem from a hatred of underground music; that would be as unfair as the assumptions made in Eagle Rants.

And God, do I love The Jesus Lizard. I could write an article twice this size about Duane Denison’s guitar work on that band’s first four records. I could tell you more than you’d ever care to know about the days I’ve spent parsing out the seemingly nonsensical lyrics Carey Mercer writes for his band Frog Eyes or about the intersections between my discovery of Grandaddy and the onset of my mother’s breast cancer during my senior year of high school.

What I’m saying is the music I love matters to me in the same way that the music you love matters to you, it just happens that my taste has possibly taken me to more idiosyncratic places than yours has. And that’s fine. There is nothing wrong with that.

I don’t know how to respond to the line “Also, other hipsters will not admit that they enjoy the same music as someone else” without pointing out that WVAU is a radio station with over 120 DJs. We share music with each other every time we put on radio shows. We have massive digital and physical libraries where we house literal years’ worth of music. If we wanted to hide our musical discoveries from each other, we wouldn’t broadcast them to the world. The comment that we won’t admit to sharing anybody else’s taste seems to come from an ignorance of how the radio works.

The Eagle Rants response brings up something that WVAU is guilty of, though— we do not encourage Top 40 shows. I can at least defend myself and say that I’ve never gone out of my way to make anybody feel bad about their music taste, Top 40 or not. If I’ve said or done anything that has implied that I think Top 40 fans are bad people or illegitimate music fans, I am sincerely sorry. Nothing could be further from my intentions as GM.

What I do want to do is uphold college radio as a haven for obscure and weird music.

Mainstream radio plays nothing but Top 40 and if you want to hear that music, that’s where you go for it. Historically, college radio has always been an outlet for the little guy to get heard. WVAU does not condescend to the person who owns The Black Eyed Peas’ discography, but it also doesn’t cater to that person. Why should it? When every other radio station in the country is designed to deliver you Kings of Leon singles, why shouldn’t WVAU spend some time celebrating artists you didn’t know you would love? The idea of college radio isn’t to prove to the listener how cool its DJs are, it’s to put a spotlight on the bands operating in the darkness.

Otherwise, I don’t know what the point would be.

By Alex Rudolph

When Ornette Coleman’s now classic The Shape of Jazz to Come was released on May 22nd, 1959, no one was quite sure how to react. At the time, bebop was the dominant form of jazz, reaching its second wave of popularity, and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue was to be released in a matter of months, paving the way for cool jazz. Jazz was in a very harmonic, very smooth, and very stylish place at the time. Ornette Coleman rejected the accessibility and grace of the period and instead took a route unheard of up until that point. The result was liberating, jarring, and, most importantly, immeasurably influential on the world of jazz.

Along with backing musicians Don Cherry (Cornet), Charlie Haden (Bass), and Billy Higgins (Drums), Coleman entered the studio and began recording the album with only the barest of sketches as to what the six pieces were to become by the end of the recording. This approach was not entirely uncommon in the world of jazz, and had been used by other musicians such as Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. However, whereas past musicians had laid out a chord structure and pattern for where the song was to progress, allowing room for some improvisation, Coleman did nothing of the sort. He instructed his musicians to improvise on all fronts, including with the very key that the piece was in. Blasphemy though it may have been to jazz purists of the 50’s, the resulting album is among the most compelling jazz records of the period.

Perhaps the song most representative of the style of the album is the crooning opener “Lonely Woman.” It opens in a fashion not unlike many jazz pieces, with a brief bass introduction, followed by a melodic line (if such a term can be applied here) provided by Coleman and Cherry. From there, however, it becomes clear that this is not a traditional bebop outing. Coleman’s distinctive timbre (provided by a plastic saxophone, the only kind he could afford at the time), shows itself on the upcoming solos, which use scales and keys not as rules which have to be followed, but as guidelines, to follow only when beneficial to his ends. The album then flows into the absolute tornado of a song “Eventually,” which greatly ups the tempo, as well as the improvisation. Charlie Haden’s bass provides a wildly fluctuating background for Coleman and Cherry to blaze improvisations over, while still returning to an incredibly impressive and tight melodic motif throughout. It is among the most impressive songs on the album not only for its finesse and technical muscle, but also for its ability to defy convention while still be gripping and listenable.

While dissonance and improvisation are the keys to this album, it manages to swing at certain points as well. The longest track on the album, “Peace” is a down-tempo groove of a song, almost reminiscent of the cool jazz which Miles Davis would pioneer shortly after the release of The Shape of Jazz to Come. The track is a near ten minute exploration of the synthesis between musical experimentation and easy listening, as it travels through both realms during its running time, appealing to both those who want to merely chill out while listening to jazz and those who think hard and long about the structure and meaning of what they are listening to. It is danceable, while still being dissectible.

Responses to the record varied wildly. Many accused Coleman and his defiance of tradition as purposefully doing so as to attract attention in a cheap manner. Even more disregarded his unorthodox playing as the result of a lack of technical skill. Even Miles Davis was perplexed by what he heard, describing Coleman as being “all screwed up inside”. These opinions, however, would give to more positive and thoughtful opinion, such as those of Virgil Thompson and Leonard Bernstein, who both praised Coleman’s work as original and genius. Miles Davis since recanted his negative opinion and admired Coleman’s efforts. The influence of the unorthodoxy of The Shape of Jazz to Come can be obviously seen on the development of the genre of free jazz, but also in many other unexpected places. Post-hardcore rockers Refused named their classic 1998 record, The Shape of Punk to Come as a tribute to Coleman. John Zorn, New York avant garde musician, has also cited the album as a major inspiration for his work. Harsh and unpleasant though it may have been at the time, The Shape of Jazz to Come has proved to be a prophetic vision of the future of the jazz music and avant-garde artistry as a whole.

By Richard Murphy

Sometimes saying the word slut just feels so good. But, I used to try to stray away from this word because feminism is no longer solely focused on male-female relationships, but rather female-female relationships. We live in a world where girls are forced to be in constant quarrel with one another. Who is prettier? Who is more feminine? Who has the best combination of tits and ass? Who is the least slutty, while still being the hottest one that hooks up with the most guys?

When I go to a party I see these sort of contradictions and gender normative roles at its finest. And I know, at times, I can be apart of it. I squeeze myself into a minidress and heels and put way too much makeup on. I become bored and flirt with guys I’m not even interested in because, it’s what girls do, right? And when I see a girl who is doing exactly what I am doing, my mind immediately turns venomous. I want to call her “slut.” The word serves as a reminder of what women are inherently supposed to be. My mind has become consumed with what makes a woman womanly, which I suppose is a June Cleaver cyborg.

When I want to call another girl that, I mean it with the cruelest of intentions. The word slut is intended to point out that the receiver of this word has no sense of femininity. They do not fulfill their womanly duties. And this is where I get to my point. I am reclaiming the word slut and Bikini Kill is going to help me.

If the anti-slut is docile and submissive, I want to tell her to fuck off. I have to say, enough of playing into feminine ideals and doing what is expected of us. I am a slut and hopefully so are you. For Bikini Kill, in the artfully crafted “Rebel Girl,” (goddess of all things bad ass) Kathleen Hanna praises the “slut” and even rejects the preconceived notions of what a slut is.

The “Rebel Girl” Hanna sings about is, quite simply, awesome. She is everything I want to be. She “holds her head up so high” and she has amazing clothes. Most importantly, she is a much needed symbol for a new brand of woman. She rejects the past ideals of womanhood. She is sexual and demanding, Hanna often times calling her a “queen.” She is not immortalized for her beauty like female subjects of songs have been in the past. Instead, she, on her own, is a revolution, “when she walks, the revolution is coming.” Not since Eugène Delacroix’s painting of “Liberty Leading the People” has a female had so much agency for social change as Rebel Girl had.

“Rebel Girl” embraces the slut. Hanna screams, “They say she’s a slut, but I know/ She is my best friend, yeah.” Everyone else claims this girl is a slut, but Hanna refuses to conform and see the negativity of this word. She praises the woman who is sexy and intriguing. She celebrates the woman that goes against the grind of chastity. There is not one ounce of jealousy in the song, but rather a validation that women are beautiful in their own right. If the Rebel Girl is a slut then being a slut is not a bad thing. Instead, it is a rejection of womanly ideals. It means that I am thinking human being. It means that I have an opinion. It means that I can wear a short dress and still call myself a feminist. It means that the next time I tell a girl she is a slut for being a functionally sexual being, it is not to insult, but rather to say “Love you like a sister always.”

So to all my sluts out there, can’t we all just get along?

By Michelle Merica

Jet lag wasn’t an issue for Givers. The sunny indie-pop quintet made the journey from Lafayette, La. to London last week, playing Shoreditch hotspot XOYO with all the energy of kids just let out on the last day of school.

The night opened with the underwhelming coed duo The Shivers, whose male singer/guitarist was more into himself than deserved and the female keyboardist and back-up vocalist wasn’t featured nearly enough. Zulu Winter bridged the gap between the rhyming bands as the second support act. The local group started their set with songs that sounded like the lovechild of The xx and Phoenix, but the set shifted to the less funky and into more alternative, generic rockier tracks. Perhaps they should’ve played their setlist backwards.

Then, with more enthusiasm than both support acts combined, Givers took the stage, signifying the start of the dancing portion of the night. Playing all of their debut album In Light, leads Taylor Guarisco and the badass-as-ever Tiffany Lamson strummed, drummed and sang though the set and shared al their boisterous, energy with the crowd so everyone in the club was in on the fun.

Highlights include “Atlantic,” Jack-of-all-trades Tiffany’s solo effort, “Go Out All Night,” the one subdued, sad track from the bright Louisiana band and the super upbeat “Up Up Up” encore, the obvious choice for the final song. (But really, why wouldn’t they close with their only single?)

Attending the gig was like being transported back to bright and sunny summer, a difficult feat considering the industrial decor of the venue often and the cold, misty London weather as the season transitions from autumn to winter. It’s been about a year since I first saw them open for Ra Ra Riot at the 9:30 club last November (they headlined at the Black Cat in October), and their growth is obvious, but their energy, which is so key to their carefree charm, has the same freshness as that bright-eyed opening act with only a five-song, self-made EP to their name, and that’s likely to never dim.

I turned 20 this summer and as I’ve mourned the loss of my teenage years, I’ve also been reminiscing about the music that defined them.

I can name exactly what I was listening to during every stage of my life. Every graduation, birthday, heartbreak, fight, and adventure had it’s own personal soundtrack. Sometimes, I remember the music more then the memories:

2001: I’m 10 years old. At this point, my musical tastes are largely determined by what I hear on the radio and what my older brother is listening to. I buy my very first CD: Destiny’s Child – Survivor. To this day, Beyonce remains my favorite female pop artist. I’m also playing Sum 41 – All Killer No Filler and The Barenaked Ladies: All Their Greatest Hits on repeat this year – stolen from my big bro.

2002: Cue middle school—Braces, glasses, bad hair, and questionable musical taste. I buy Michelle Branch – The Spirit Room. I read the liner notes cover to cover and know the words to every song. I ‘discover’ Avril Lavigne’s single “Complicated” and get really annoyed when it becomes popular (so hip). I also buy a Sheryl Crow album this year. If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad?

2003: 7th grade. I make my next purchase: John Mayer – Heavier Things. At less then five feet tall I declare “Bigger Then My Body” as my own personal anthem. On someone’s Zanga profile (way too hip for livejournal), I hear “Amie” by Damien Rice. I recognize his voice from the VH1 Top 20 Countdown, which I watched religiously every week (too hip for MTV). I fall in love with Damien Rice. Cue beginning of teenage angst and lifelong pattern of having crushes on boys who are unobtainable.

2004: I’m 13 years old. Hungry for new music, I go hunting through my house and discover a CD given to my brother but never opened: David Bowie – ChangesBowie. Life. Forever. Changed. I listen on my Walkman on the bus to school every day for one year, and I’m hooked forever.

I declare all modern music to be garbage and refuse to listen to anything but Queen, Santana, the Police, the Beatles and Bowie. I save up for my very first iPod. On the back where most people have their names engraved, I choose to write: “Life’s begun, nights are warm and the days are young.”

2005: Freshman year of high school. I credit this next purchase as the defining moment in my musical story. I stand in Target with two albums in hand: a new John Mayer CD (something familiar) and Modest Mouse’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News (it has cool cover-art and some song I’d heard on a commercial break of Degrassi).

I bravely purchase Modest Mouse and pop the CD in on the way home from the store with Mom. She calls it “weird.” Which means I have to love it. I proceed to listen to that album obsessively, turn into a full-fledged music addict and never look back.

2006: I’m 15. I get a job at a bagel shop that only plays syndicated episodes of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 and therefore learn the words to every popular song from 1970 to 2000. Tracey Chapmen’s “Fast Car” still reminds me of slicing bagels and jamming with my sassy manager Bernice.

Thanks to Myspace and illegal downloading, I become exposed to an infinitely wider array of music. Maybe all modern music isn’t so terrible. I lose the concept of albums for a while here and start amassing a miscellaneous collection of maybe five tracks per artist: The Strokes. The Hives. The White Stripes. Anything with a “the” in front of it. I take enormous pride in the fact that I know different music then most of the kids in my high school in West Virginia. The song on my Myspace profile is Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine” and I put some lyrics from Spoon’s “I Summon You” in my AIM buddy profile to demonstrate how unique and deep I am.

2007: A very insightful, intelligent and beautiful friend dies. I’m 16 years old and don’t take it very well at all. It is just the kind of fuel that drives a teenager to listen to really, really gloomy music. And I do. This is the year I burrow into Bright Eyes, Sufjan Stevens, Death Cab, Radiohead, Elliot Smith, and Neural Milk Hotel. I make a lot of mixtapes and quote far too many song lyrics in my Facebook statuses.

2008: Senior year of high school. I find my Mom’s old Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Cat Stevens albums this year and fall hopelessly in love. But most of my memories of this year are just about being beautifully young and reckless with my best friends. We play “Benny and the Jets” and “Roxanne” over and over again on every jukebox we can find. We drive around just because we can, listening to Ben Kweller and Ben Folds and getting sentimental as we prepare to split up for college.

2009: This is the year I graduate, turn 18 and start my first semester of college. I listen to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot obsessively that spring when trying to decide between schools. I discover this nifty website “Pitchfork” and read all about Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem, Deerhunter and Grizzly Bear. My musically inclined senior prom date gives me 12 gigabytes of music he thinks is missing from my collection. I listen to the Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, and Big Star all summer long.

In the fall, I move to D.C. and go to my first real concert – Yo La Tengo at the 9:30 Club. It’s the greatest high I’ve ever experienced—and I start fiending for live music like an addict, going to any show I can or can’t afford.

2010: I’m a DJ for my college radio station and get what feels like a limitless number of albums from the station (compared to my one-per-year status long ago). For the first time, everyone knows the bands I know- and more about them then I do. Everyone else went to their first concert at age 10. I feel like less of the music connoisseur I thought I was. But it’s thrilling to find people who like the same music as I do.

My friends deem me a “hipster” when I talk about the new bands I like, but I don’t even care because I get to talk about music on my show for two hours every week. I start blogging about music, I make a best of 2010 list, I read music news fanatically, I lose count of the shows I’ve been to, I wonder what I’m even doing in school when what I really want is to be a music supervisor and make soundtracks for other people’s lives- not just my own.

2011: Currently listening to the new Feist, St. Vincent, Girls, and Atlas Sound albums on repeat. Along with all the music I’ve loved over the years and anything else I can get my hands on. When people ask me what kind of music I like, I truly can never answer because I love it all: 70’s Art Rock, Classic Soul, Female Singer-Songwriters, Post-Punk, Twee, 80’s Pop, Rap, Shoegaze, Alt-Country– whatever you feel like calling it.

And I still love Sheryl Crow and Sum41—and not even in an ironic “Ha Ha this song is so bad/silly/old but I still know all the words” way. Music should never be something you are ashamed of. It’s easy to turn your nose at music that is deemed too popular or too obscure, I’m certainly guilty of it sometimes. As guilty as I am of letting someone’s musical tastes influence my opinion of them. But music is so much more then the stigma that surrounds it, something every music lover knows. You listen to what you feel connected to– and that’s it. In the end, the label, genre, decade, and popularity just doesn’t matter.

The music I grew up with actually shaped me into a different person. I’d never abandon or disown it. I’m genuinely glad I grew up in a little musical bubble in West Virginia– because bursting out of that bubble has been nothing less then exhilarating.

By Emily White

There are not many bands whose live act could not benefit from a spectacular setting. Surely even the bowel-loosening, Juno-award-winning strains of Nickelback could become magical and intoxicating if you saw them in the right place (inside a burning freight car, in a tank full of rabid, bitter chimpanzees, etc). It follows then that when the Dum Dum Girls played with a full view of the New York City night skyline behind them at Cantora Labs’ Smartlounge on Thursday at CMJ, mouths frothed, cameras snapped, and people pushed hard to get to the front.

Dee Dee and Jules Dum Dum played lo-fi electric guitars without bass or percussion, stripping down songs both old and new to their bones. The music sounded entirely different without the smoke and mirrors of reverb and distortion that muddle some of their earlier releases. This led to a few revelations:

1. Dee Dee (wearing dark shades, red lips, and a penciled on beauty mark) can really, truly carry a tune. She delivered singsong melodies from new songs like Hold My Hand, Heartbeat and Bedroom Eyes with clamped-jaw intensity and steely precision that added a well-needed bit of spice to so much sugar.

2. Nearly every Dum Dum Girls song finds its greatest strength in a basic, powerfully structured melodic spine. Layered harmonies and tin-can production hid this fact on I Will Be and their self-titled LP, but live, songs like Hey Sis became direct, melodic punches to the gut

3. The new album, Only in Dreams, is worth a second listen. Don’t be fooled by the ninth-grade-photography-class cover art, or the repetition of the lead single “Bedroom Eyes”. The melodies came to the forefront at such a bare-bones show and I was converted. Thankfully it was loud enough that only the people immediately in front of me could hear me singing.

By Emily Lagg

Beans on Toast
Thursdays 2pm-4pm
facebook page
Show Description
I mostly play current British alternative/indie, with a couple club tunes thrown in there. I do enjoy throwing it back to the good ol’ days of S Club 7 though, so come prepared for nostalgia.
Name of Favorite Other WVAU Show
What the Haack, Ultimate Intimacy, and Electric Factory

Garden of Leo
Mondays 2am-4am
Show Description
On the first day in the garden, God said let there be light. On the second day, he said let there be shoegazing progressive dream-pop lo-fi chillwave noisy indie rock.

The Wednesday Wakeup
Wednesdays 6am-8am
Show Description
Hey cool cats, welcome to my show. Here you will hear a mix of music that can make you feel at home in either Appalachia or our beloved DC clubs. I like music that makes you dance and makes you think, music to drink tea to and music to sip Patron to. Wake up to the sound of my voice every Wednesday morning at six.

Bridging the Gap
Mondays 8am-10am
facebook page
Show Description
Linking diverse types of music to portray the interconnectedness of yesterday and today’s music. Experimenting with the idea of globalization through music, how one genre affects the next, and how music has progressed to its current platform. Listeners can expect to hear a wide variety from classic hip-hop to alternative rock to Latin American indigenous to jazz to electronic.

Name of Favorite Other WVAU Show
Spaghetti Flows, Kirby Airride

Gypsy Soul
Saturdays 12-2am
Show Description
Gypsy is an eclectic mix of folk, R&B, and blues-rock. Let my tunes serenade your drunken stupor. Name of Favorite Other WVAU Show
Ubuntu Diaspora

Wiggle Room Wanderlust
Fridays 6pm-8pm
Show Description
This is the music your pastor sermoned against. I wanna dance and wanna it with you. Join me and the night to brighten your Sunday blight.

Mochi Crunch
Fridays 9pm-10pm
facebook page
Show Description
Get your snack fix in with some salty or sweet tunes. Everything from Dubstep to Disney.

The Fourth Hour of Today
Fridays 8am-10am
Show Description
The Fourth Hour of Today is an eclectic mix of modern indie with some throwbacks to eras before we were born that we’re nostalgic for anyway. We will also have “Urban Dictionary Definition of the Day,” to keep our audience hip and cool. Witty banter and awesomeness may ensue.

Georgia Rule
Fridays 1pm-2pm
facebook page
Show Description
Georgia Rule is a rollercoaster ride that will take you along music tracks ranging from indie to oldies to dance to Brazilian and back. If you’re looking for a radio show that caters to all of your ears’ musical needs, this is the place. So sit back, relax and enjoy the crazy ride.

The Morning After
Sundays 4am-6am
facebook page
Show Description
CJ Iler and me arguing on the radio with some music and whatnot. You’re welcome.

Moriarty Party
Wednesdays 4am-6am
twitter
Show Description
Hello, darlings. I’d love for you to listen in on a healthy dose of dance-y indie twee alternative hipster music (you know the type), but also chill electronica, 80s power ballads and mullet rock, movie and tv soundtracks, gypsy rock, jazzy hip hop and nonstop albums. I’m constantly attached to my twitter feed and I adore the game six degrees with Kevin Bacon(Kevin Bacon optional). My show will basically play anything distracting enough to get you through the caffeine haze you are probably in, why else would you be awake this time?

Overwhelmed by the rack? Having trouble unearthing the hidden gems buried in the studio shelves?
We’ve recruited the WVAU Assistant Music Directors to help us unpack the rack and share their favorite spins.

First up is Music Director Maxwell Tani, who gives us his picks for the semester’s best rack spins, with songs from Tammar, Casiokids and a seven-minute Yuck epic. Stream and download Maxwell’s playlist below.

Download on Mediafire

Thee Oh Sees – Carrion Crawler/The Dream

A combination of two separate EP’s, this latest release from John Dwyer’s Thee Oh Sees is a relentless, no-frills collection of garage rock stompers, as opposed to the psych-pop tunes showcased on their earlier 2011 album Castlemania. While a few of the tracks of short blasts of distortion and general madness, many of the songs have a raw, jam-like feel to them that capture the essence of the band’s renowned live shows.

Most notably, the album’s title tracks (note: I don’t know if an album can have two title tracks, but bear with me here) “Carrion Crawler” and “The Dream” are furious barnstormers that never feel like aimless noodling or guitar exercises, despite their lengthy running times. If you need a break from synth-dominated tunes or quiet folk ballads, this is the place to start. -Cameron Meindl

RIYL: Jay Reatard, Ty Segall
Five-word synopsis: Turn it up to 11.
Listen to this album while you’re: Speeding down the highway, weaving in and out of traffic.
Rating: 9/10 – Seriously, this album is awesome.
Recommended: 1, 6, 8

CMJ’s schedule is full of tiny bands playing half a dozen shows each in an effort to get noticed by college radio stations and blogs and to interface with promotional companies. However cool these bands may try to appear (and I watched two separate bass players try to pull off wearing sunglasses indoors, so these bands are definitely trying), deep down we all know they are desperate for attention. They want to quit their day jobs, they want to get a powerful promo company to support their next release and they want to be the band that breaks out of this year’s conference. For every Sleigh Bells or Surfer Blood, there are a hundred bands that will play CMJ and never get anywhere, and part of the experience of the conference is watching these bands put everything into a performance that will get them nothing and this is very sad.

There were a few established bands who showed up to appease their labels and promo companies who brought out the opposite emotion in me; watching a relatively large band play like they don’t expect anything magical to come of their set is invigorating. A Place to Bury Strangers did this for me when they played a full set at Brooklyn’s Union Pool during the Dead Oceans/Secretly Canadian/Jagjaguwar showcase on October 19.

The band has released two albums and are prepping a third for 2012; their first album blew them up into one of the country’s biggest noise-rock acts, mainly because their concept of “noise-rock” does not end with “our guitarist has a distortion pedal and the vocals are buried in the mix.” They make loud and brutal music in an indie landscape full of acoustic guitars and ironic covers of R&B songs. I skipped putting the band’s self-titled debut album on my iPod for the first few months after it came out; I was afraid I would be minding my own business in “shuffle” mode and then, suddenly, a track like “To Fix The Gash In Your Head” would jump out at me and destroy my ear drums.

When A Place to Bury Strangers took the stage, they did so directly after the loose, by-the-numbers pop of Gauntlet Hair, a band whose between-song stage presence was littered with nervous laughter and down-turned eyes. Wearing leather jackets that would quickly be shrugged off in the heat of the small venue, A Place to Bury Strangers opened their performance with a new song that began and ended in dissonant blasts of feedback. For the first twenty minutes or so there were no house lights to speak of and the band was lit only by films being projected onto the stage.

“Cool” is hard to quantify but easier to pinpoint when directly juxtaposed with “awkward.” Gauntlet Hair may one day find a way to perform live, but you stack them against a professional band like A Place to Bury Strangers and it’s hard not to see the silliness in all of their affectations. (For reference, Gauntlet Hair’s MySpace page was created two months after A Place to Bury Strangers’ most recent album came out.)

Over the next hour and twenty minutes, A Place to Bury Strangers played almost exclusively new material. I only recognized two songs, “Ocean” and “She Dies,” but the unreleased cuts were strong enough that this never became an issue. The new material still shows off A Place to Bury Strangers’ chief influences (The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division), but the new songs seemed more focused on melody than what we’ve come to expect from this band. There have always been strong hooks in the music, but they’ve usually been buried under heavier layers of haze than the ones the band was showing off at the showcase that night.

The ambience of the show was also held in stark relief against the bands performing earlier in the showcase. Most bands don’t have a look, and while there isn’t anything wrong with that at all, it really blows you away when a band can nail its presence the way A Place to Bury Strangers did. The projector continued throughout the show and, maybe twenty minutes in, singer/guitarist Oliver Ackermann began to sporadically set off a smoke machine. By the band’s last song the smoke was so think in the small venue that the projections began to show up on the wall of fog between the musicians and their audience.

Halfway through that last song, Ackermann triggered a strobe light and the visual overload, mixed cleanly with the ear-splitting noise, made the show a capital ‘e’ Event in a schedule full of good bands lacking visual aesthetics. Enough care goes into every part of A Place to Bury Strangers’ live show that you don’t want to look down to check the time or skip a song in order to buy a drink. They know what they’re doing.

By Alex Rudolph

Opening for Switch & Scottie B this Saturday at U Street Music Hall, D.C. Drum & Bass DJ Harry Ransom is undoubtedly one of the upcoming creative minds of Drum & Bass in the D.C. area.

A man with a tinkering intuition for developing production techniques, some come to know him by his alter-dj moniker, R4ns0m. Equal parts Drum & Bass producer and live DJ, the brooding complexities of his sound really build to something higher. I’ve been reading Harry’s explorations and technical ventures in the genre via his tumblr and DCDNB, a project he’s running for local D.C. area Drum & Bass minds to collaborate.

Download his Drum & Bass track “Instigator” on his Soundcloud:
Harry Ransom – “Instigator” [FREE DOWNLOAD] by R4NS0M

Ransom will be giving American University a taste of his work via a live DJ set on WVAU’s resident indie/electronic promo show Electric Factory, this Thursday November 17 from 4pm-6pm EST.

We’ll also be giving away tickets to the Switch, Scottie B, and Harry Ransom show during the broadcast. Tune in to win!

Check out Harry Ransom on Facebook and Twitter

Writing about Cloud Cult is hard. Listening to Cloud Cult is easy – with mellow percussion and violin melodies, the music feels like something your ears don’t just want but desperately need to hear. But thinking too long or too deeply about Cloud Cult is simply hard. The group’s long history, when looked at too carefully, becomes a beautifully articulated before-and-after of a tragedy.

In 1995, Craig Minowa got a rag-tag group of local artists together to help him record his solo album, and the result was Cloud Cult. Many record companies came knocking, but the group kept their local soul and environmental principles and decided to self-published their first album. In 1997 Minowa established Earthology Records right on his organic farm outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has said he created the record company out of necessity. No one was making environmentally friendly CDs at the time, so Minowa started making CDs out a recycled material, recycled jewel cases, using soy ink, and most importantly geothermal energy. Earthology’s buildings were made out of reclaimed wood and other recycled materials, and the entire record label is a non-profit that makes considerable donations to charity.

While running his farm and record label, Minowa still found time to record albums and tour with Cloud Cult (on a biodiesel powered bus, of course). One of the unique features of a Cloud Cult show is that it usually feature’s Minowa’s wife, local artist Connie Minowa, along with Scott West doing live paintings onstage during the show, as well as performing with the band. At the end of the show, both paintings are auctioned off to the highest bidder. The paintings are inspired by the music, and based heavily on the imagery in the lyrics. This custom of onstage painting is a good example of one of the most important aspects of Cloud Cult, their integration.

The art is seamlessly intertwined into the show, the label is combined with the farm, and the band’s environmental sensibilities fill the songs with lovely, nostalgic lyrics. There is no damning of current policies, criticism of the wasteful modern life, or cry for everyone to Occupy Minnesota. Instead, when Minowa wants to write about those issues by going in the other direction. The lyrics focus on happier times, green grass, shining skies, and clear water. We are not shamed for throwing away plastic water bottles when we couldn’t find the recycling, but inspired to go lay in the grass and plant a tree.

In 2002, Craig and Connie’s two year old son Kaidin died unexpectedly and unexplainably in his sleep one night. That’s the kind of tragedy that can destroy a person, and when you hear the music Minowa wrote afterwards, you get the sense it very nearly did. In the song “Your 8th Birthday” off the album The Meaning of 8, an album released eight years after Kaidin’s death, Minowa is literally screaming his son’s name in between lyrics like “Who could change your silly life into a screaming supernova /You do/Who could change my sleepy brain into the eye of a hurricane.” It’s a heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece of pure emotion, and nine times out of ten it makes me tear up.

Even after such a great loss, although it might be hard to believe, life goes on. Nine years later, the farm and label are still successful. In 2009 a documentary came out called No One Said It Would Be Easy – A Film About Cloud Cult that combines interviews, live footage, and behind the scenes footage to create a film that is half reflective, half introduction. The Minowas have had two more children, and Cloud Cult’s latest album Light Chasers moves away from the mourning of previous albums to a new, hopeful sound. Hopeful for their children, hopeful for the environment, and hopeful for the future.

By Alice Quinlan

Without getting all Almost Famousy, what I love about music is that it celebrates what is real and messy and honest. School and society are often preoccupied with perfection and having it all together (it’s stressful, man!) but CMJ and more specifically, Atlas Sound at CMJ was a good reminder of what’s beautiful and right in the world.

Atlas Sound played a warm and soothing afternoon set in the lobby of the Ace Hotel on the third day of CMJ. Atlas Sound is the solo side project of Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, named after the tape recorder he used to record songs as a child. Less structured than the five-piece setup of Deerhunter, Atlas Sound has a lo-fi “recorded in your living room”-type feel.

The lobby of the hotel seemed to perfectly cater to Cox’s bedroom rock stylings as fans formed a semi-circle around him, sitting by his feet and crammed on every available surface. Cox helped the homegrown vibe by showing up in pajamas and moccasins.

Under warm tungsten lights Cox played a sampling of songs from his most recent release, Parallax. What’s most impressive about Atlas Sound, especially live, is how Cox can make such a deep and layered sound with just an acoustic guitar and some pedals. The music is simultaneously complex and delicate and somehow very relatable, which translates well to Cox’s strange yet endearing stage presence.

While tuning his guitar Cox told anecdotes about how he had recorded a few tracks of Parallax in his room at the Ace Hotel when he had run out of studio time. He thanked the nice Indian family living next door for letting him be so loud.

Dressed in his pinstripe pajamas, sporting bed head and looking a bit sleepy and spaced out, Bradford Cox and his music seemed to express that you don’t always have to make sense or be on top of your shit to make something beautiful and eloquent.

(ALSO Bradford Cox is super nice. Maeve and I met him and have a grainy cell phone photo to prove it!)

By Carrie Walters

Merge Records – “The indie label that got big and stayed small.” While many indie record labels strive for the “we’re doing our best” mentality (Fat Possum comes to mind), Merge seeks perfection. But does their quest for Billboard ranks and Grammys stray away from the indie sub-culture?

It’s hard to consider a label independent, at least in the sense of obscurity, when it features the Grammy winners Arcade Fire and the Top Ten-charting band, Spoon. But the sound is where it counts, and the direction of this label is unorthodox in terms of other competitors.

The beginnings of Merge matches up with that of many other indie labels: in a bedroom, where a couple of 20-something-year-olds pledged a simple mission statement to make good music. Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan started the label solely to produce music for their band, Superchunk. Early on, Merge served just an easy way to release their and their friends’ music, but has now expanded to multiple genres, bands, and nations.

In 1996, Merge had to borrow money from their first project Superchunk in order to release albums from late 90’s rising indie rock bands like Verbena, Butterglory, and a little project called Neutral Milk Hotel. Still promoting lead singer Mangum’s two albums, Merge continues to relate to the web 1.0 era of face-to-face communication, which is attributed to the success of Neutral Milk Hotel’s first album.

The beginning of this century showed continued promise for this 90’s label. Merge’s first album to reach the USA Billboard 200 was Arcade Fire’s first full-length, “Funeral.” Not only did this album receive marginal attention in Billboard’s arena, but it also achieved commercial success in the independent community. “Funeral” not only put Arcade Fire on the list of bands to watch, but it also placed Merge into the national scene. Recently, the Arcade Fire success story has seemed to overshadow the other bands in Merge. For example, the Canadian indie-pop band, Destroyer, continues to release notable albums in almost every year since 1996, and recently released “Kaputt” that keeps up with Dan Bejar’s unusual light-jazz style.

Currently, Merge’s roster is heavy in the modern folk section, featuring a prominent line-up that includes She & Him, M. Ward, Mountain Goats, and Wye Oak, with each band offering something different. She & Him released both “Volumes” under Merge, with help from various Bright Eyes members (Rachel Blumberg, Mike Mogis) as well as M. Ward himself. Conor Oberst remains an active member of Merge, touring with his Mystic Valley Band. This cooperation shows the ties between record labels – Oberst himself is a founding member of Saddle Creek – as well as displays how labels love to keep the creativity within the company.

Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle produces a passionate, folk, “bi-fi” mix of traditional lyrics and varied instruments which has morphed from a solo project, to a full band, and back again. He, just like most bands under Merge, has been producing music that spans over two decades. And while many of the band members on Merge are in their early forties, there is also promise for a more youthful sound. Wye Oak represents this category well. Their new twist on folk placed them above many with their 2011 release, Civilian. Telekinesis is another youthful, power-pop band from Seattle that released their first album in 2009 under Merge. Since then they’ve released two albums, both receiving acclaim for their relaxed hooks and energetic sound.

While Merge sometimes claims to be creative while at the same time using a business model to ensure their originality, in no sense does this show the downfall of the label’s conventionally sound driven model. True, the label’s strive for perfection may detach themselves from many new trends – try to find a synth-pop or chillwave band on the label. However, guitars seem to be enough for Merge, and they’ve been searching for and perfecting their model for over twenty years. After all, a record company that’s run by a band seems to be a successful business model to me.

By Leo Zausen

“Grandma, I’ve Been Unruly” is just one unique lyric from Purity Ring’s collection of tracks. Purity Ring’s songs are as naïve as they are passionate, and their performance is no different.

Purity Ring is an electronic Canadian duo that favors abstract lyrics and synthesizers. The group is comprised of Corin Roddick, Megan James, a synthesizer, a bass drum, and a homemade instrument that Corin invented that resembles a shoddy plumbing job but sounds like a Moog. Despite the fact Purity Ring has only released three songs, they draw quite a crowd.

The concert took place November 10th in a warehouse in Baltimore called the Soft House. The site has multiple apartments inside and a performance area near the entrance. When my friend John, my fellow DJ Melissa, and I arrived at this one-of-a-kind venue the opener starting performing.

Doldrums was the the one-man opener, the project of a 21-year old Montreal-based electronic artist named Airick Woodhead. Doldrums’ songs are fairly experimental and include samplings of phrases and drum beats over his vocal performance, which culminated in the glitchy-est set known to man.

After a small dog (literally, a small dog) ran into the venue and everyone received their fair share of Natty Bo, Purity Ring took their cue and started setting up. The anticipation wuz killing me! They started out their set with “Ungirthed” and moved on to several unreleased songs.

The energy of Purity Ring was contagious – they never stopped dancing and banging their trigger-filled contraption. I heartily enjoyed their 30 minute performance, which included hits like “Belispeak” and “Lofticries.”

I was able to speak with Corin and Megan a bit and they are surely one of kindest bands on the indie scene. Hopefully they will have more songs released when they return to the DC area.

By Faith Masi
Photos by John Lichtefeld of http://www.polychronic.us/